The proliferation of cloud-based services and platforms continues to increase. Specifically, cloud-based content management services and platforms have impacted the way personal and corporate information are stored, and has also impacted the way personal and corporate information are shared and managed. Individuals can avail themselves of such storage and management services to store and share large volumes of personal content objects, such as pictures and videos.
Enterprises (e.g., companies, firms, etc.) might also want to use cloud-based content management platforms to secure, store and manage sensitive proprietary content objects, while enhancing workforce productivity and while enhancing the experience of their customers (e.g., users, vendors, contractors, partners, etc.) when interacting with the online personality of the enterprise. However, challenges can arise for an enterprise when incorporating a cloud-based content management platform into the enterprise business model and operations. In some environments, in particular those environments subject to strict compliance and regulatory requirements (e.g., healthcare, finance, etc.), content security and tracking are vital. For example, regulations and/or certain service-level agreements may require that the enterprise take on the responsibility and control of the content security, tracking, and reporting (e.g., for auditing purposes). In some cases, the enterprise may further want to control and manage the user experience and relationship through one or more software applications developed and/or approved by the enterprise. Further, the enterprise may also want to take advantage of the collaboration components (e.g., tasks, comments, workflow, etc.) delivered by a content management platform. Thus, the enterprise would want to satisfy myriad requirements as for branding and customer experience, while availing themselves to the features of a cloud-based content management platform. In practice, the enterprise would like the customer/user to interface with an application aligned to the presentation of the enterprise's brands, and yet the customer/user would have no awareness that the enterprise is using a third-party cloud-based content management platform.
Legacy approaches to providing content management services to enterprises have several limitations. In one legacy approach, an enterprise customer or user is redirected from an enterprise application to the content management service when a need arises to use or apply one or more of the content management features (e.g., content access, editing, sharing, collaboration, etc.). Such an approach can result in the inconvenience of requiring the user to set up an account with the content management service and to provide a second login (e.g., the first being for the enterprise application) to access the features and content of the service. This legacy approach also limits the scope of control the enterprise can wrest to manage the customer experience and relationship. In some legacy cases, the aforementioned redirection approach inhibits auditing and tracking since the enterprise does not have ownership of the user's personal content and may not have the visibility (e.g., as pertains to workspaces, folders, etc.) necessary to track the user actions. Since the user may login to the content management service both as a user of an enterprise application and a personal user, a potential exists that enterprise and personal content can be intermingled, in turn creating a potential for compromising security, regulatory compliance, and privacy. Merely incorporating any cloud-based service platform into an enterprise environment is still deficient, at least in the sense that a redirection approach remains beholden to the security approach and collaboration features offered by the incorporated cloud-based service platform. In another legacy approach, the enterprise can setup an internal content storage system to enable sharing of content with their users. However, such internal systems have limited security, collaboration, and maintenance features as compared to a cloud-based content management platform.
The problem to be solved is therefore rooted in technological limitations of the legacy approaches. Improved techniques, in particular improved application of technology, are needed to address the problem of incorporating features of a cloud-based service platform into an enterprise application while maintaining enterprise-level branding and security and auditing policies that conform to a given security and/or regulatory requirement, and/or service-level agreement. More specifically, the technologies applied in the aforementioned legacy approaches fail to achieve sought-after capabilities of the herein disclosed techniques for accessing a cloud-based service platform using enterprise application authentication. What is needed is a technique or techniques to improve the application and efficacy of various technologies as compared with the application and efficacy of legacy approaches.